HOLE IN THE SKY

First contact with an extraterrestrial entity comes to Mother Earth via her First People.

Wilsonis no stranger to big-thinking epistolary SF epics. Here, armed with a few novel entry points into an old horror story (à la The Thing), he turns his attention to an alien invader way more frightening than a microbe. To get the dubious bits out of the way, the U.S. government accidentally created an AI that can accurately predict the future, every time, but only via hard-to-interpret poetry, comprehensible only by the grad student whose brain provided its template. Known as “the Man Downstairs,” this reluctant guru discovers a large anomaly at the heliopause, the very edge of known space, and it’s heading this way. Meanwhile, NASA engineer Mikayla Johnson has discovered her own anomaly via the custom augmented reality glasses she wears to combat her extreme social anxiety—they’re not only learning on their own, but talking to her, warning that something is coming. Gavin Clark, a military man tasked with neutralizing new weapon technology, ably fills the role of both government spook and shoot-first skeptic with clipped precision. Finally, Wilson adds a lot of heart in Jim Hardgray, a Cherokee electrician with a year of sobriety under his belt and plenty to make up for, not least to his 13-year-old daughter, Tawny. As in Robopocalypse (2011), the story is presented via each character’s first-person narration, which adds some interesting fragmentation later on as characters transform over a few desperate hours. As the unknown entity makes a beeline for the famous Native American burial mounds in Spiro, Oklahoma, Wilson stitches together a prescription bottle’s worth of nightmarish images, invasive biotechnology, and Indigenous cosmology. What remains is a ticking clock scenario that gets more and more unhinged (and occasionally unclear) as it counts down and our strange quintet faces the music of the spheres.

Less spectacle than a robot uprising but deeper, weirder, and harder to shake off.